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EMC â€“ Emailxtender as we know it is dead. Documentum V1 will only appeal to people that buy anything shrink-wrapped in an EMC box. >From what I can see it is designed for large Enterprises, but at the time it will be Enterprise ready (V2?) the market will have moved on to mid-size accounts who bring most revenue. No way a 500 seat customer could afford a full-blown Documentum install with the required PS.

Who at EMC would make their numbers with smaller accounts? I expect them to do marketing with some EV conversions, then struggle to deliver and finally to be a â€œnicheâ€ player for those customers that are die-hard EMC shops.

I would like to know from the responder on :
EMC’s arciving product, although branded under Documentum, it is still a different infrastructure.
EMC has added a compliance archiving which stores in Documentum repositiry using APIs,
which is optional.

1. Where does EmailXtender fail and why is it dead ?
2. Now it is branded as SourcOne, is there any difference ?

actually I believe that EMC did a great job a confusing everyone in the industry. First they had a document about their “EMC Archive Services for Email”, which suggested that the underlying architecture would be based on Documentum. Seems like this was “Markitecture” and never materialized, but rather was renamed into EMC Source One.
I thought myself from talking to EMC several times that the new product would be based on Documentum…

And as you rightly say, there is an option to store to Documentum. But if Documentum was scalable enough and provided the better platform, why is it optional? Seems like it validates the point that you would hardly be able to sell an EMail Archive if someone has to acquire Documentum (Check pricelist!) first. And it makes me think that Documentum would simply be overloaded with all that unstructured mail content. Rather build a connector to your ECM system and keep it tidy, just like you get for EV…

I don’t know where to start, when you ask where EmailXtender fails… Possibly just mentioning the fragile Indexing which is corrupt again before rebuilding from the first problem, or the un-usable admin console, the scalability issues, the problems with Envelope Journaling, the terribly engineered Offline Cache. Probably the biggest flaw on my list is the inability to export to PSTs – Basically EMC has hijacked your data and most companies now pay the price for not doing a proper evaluation including a plan for “gettting out”.

From what I know the EmailXtender development is in “Maintenance Mode” with only important fixes coing out of India. The Source One has been developed from scratch, probably with a lot of “lessons learned” from EmailXtender and – yes, Enterprise Vault – but the initial feed-back from the first people I talked to who evaluated it, was that it lacks a lot of “maturity” or to be more precise, small config options to get security and archiving options customized.

In that context: Can someone confirm that Source One still needs DiskXtender to write to a Centera? If so, I would think that EMC is the laughing stock in the archiving industry…

We have been using SourceOne for a year now, with our EmailXtender server in read-only mode (you cannot move the containers to SourceOne unless you use an expensive tool and months of consultancy). To keep it short ‘we have been conned’, more features in SourceOne – YES, more scalable – YES, better product – NO. We get weekly index corruption, it is even worse the EmailXtender, no public folder archiving and no export to PST option from search results. We are in the process of moving away as to date the index problem has never been fixed and we doubt it ever will be.